Louis Pasteur developed the first successful rabies vaccine, used to treat Joseph Meister in 1885.
Pasteur and his colleagues created the treatment by weakening the rabies virus in infected rabbit spinal-cord tissue. On 6 July 1885, they began a series of increasingly stronger inoculations for nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been badly bitten by a rabid dog. Meister survived, making the treatment a landmark in medical history.
Pasteur was not a physician; he was a French chemist and microbiologist. His work helped establish germ theory and showed that laboratory science could produce protective vaccines against infectious disease.
The rabies vaccine was not the first vaccine ever made—that distinction belongs to Edward Jenner’s smallpox work—but it was the first important vaccine developed through a laboratory-based, microbiological approach. Modern rabies post-exposure treatment uses a safer, standardized vaccine and, for serious exposures, rabies immunoglobulin.